Who Is Pulitzer Prize Winner Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah?

The Columbia University graduate has created poignant profiles on Toni Morrison, Dave Chapelle and James Baldwin.

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has added another great accomplishment to her résumé: winning a Pulitzer Prize.

On Thursday, the writer was honored with the 2018 best feature writing award for her GQ profile on Charleston mass murderer and White supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof. Ghansah, 36, represents Black excellence as an essayist and author whose work is as emotionally stirring as it is culturally relevant.

Ghansah has a Master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University, the very school that presents the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, literature and musical composition.

She Has Penned Profiles On Several Influential Figures

The essayist has crafted stories on a myriad of people including Toni Morrison, Dave Chapelle and James Baldwin. Her work won acclaim from many aspiring writers and working creatives.

“Ghansah is an unparalleled architect of the profile,” writer Danielle Jackson wrote about the author in a Longreads piece last September. “She can strike an ideal balance between scene and exposition, lyricism and plot. She can bring a subject to life with fresh insight, and keep herself in the narrative in a way that is unobtrusive and necessary. Because she is obsessed with beginnings and origin stories, she never fails to account for a sense of place — the sights and smells and sounds of the space her subjects take up — giving her work an exciting viscerality.”

Jackson continued about Ghansah, “The subjects she has often chosen — among them Dave Chappelle, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Beyoncé — have been arbiters of black excellence, geniuses who, in Ghansah’s work, exist not in a vacuum, not as exceptions, but in a community that has incubated the genius.”

22. Scenes From The Demonstration Against Racism At Starbucks

The protest is growing outside the @Starbucks. The woman on the right in the red shirt is 90 years old and told a story about her father who died when she was 9 as a result of racial profiling and police brutality. pic.twitter.com/DxQb5OYtSG

Activists Protest Racial Profiling, Arrests Of Black People In Starbucks

Black Lives Matter activists called for a boycott of the Starbucks coffee chain just days after an employee called the police to arrest two Black men inside a Philadelphia location were not buying anything and wouldn't leave. Despite a number of factors that should have convinced police to show discretion and restraint -- the men were not armed; they were not violent; they did not resist arrest; the White man who they were meeting yelled at the police that the men did nothing wrong; a bystander filmed the entire episode on video -- then men were still taken into custody Thursday.
The video has since gone viral.
https://twitter.com/missydepino/status/984539713016094721
The first of what is expected to be many protests took place April 14 at the Starbucks location in question.